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On the Female of the Species
by Lucy Cooke
Book Reviewed by:A fierce, funny, and revolutionary look at the queens of the animal kingdom.
Studying zoology made Lucy Cooke feel like a sad freak. Not because she loved spiders or would root around in animal feces: all her friends shared the same curious kinks. The problem was her sex. Being female meant she was, by nature, a loser.
Since Charles Darwin, evolutionary biologists have been convinced that the males of the animal kingdom are the interesting ones—dominating and promiscuous, while females are dull, passive, and devoted.
In Bitch, Cooke tells a new story. Whether investigating same-sex female albatross couples that raise chicks, murderous mother meerkats, or the titanic battle of the sexes waged by ducks, Cooke shows us a new evolutionary biology, one where females can be as dynamic as any male. This isn't your grandfather's evolutionary biology. It's more inclusive, truer to life, and, simply, more fun.
AUTHOR'S NOTE ON LANGUAGE
Language evolves rapidly, and there is currently much conversation about the conflation of sex and gender terms. It is critical to use these terms appropriately and not to confuse them. Most scientists agree that non-human animals do not have gender. In this book, the terms female and male refer to an animal's biological sex. I do engage in anthropomorphizing, to an extent. Sometimes this is because these were the historical terms used. For example, I may refer to an animal's genitalia as being 'masculinized' or a brain being 'feminized' as this was the original scientific description. Such gendered terms needn't and shouldn't be used to describe animals' sex characteristics and behaviours in scholarly realms today. I also use gendered terms such as 'mother' and 'father' to describe animals, because these are the terms used by the scientists in question and most of my audience will understand what or who I refer to with these terms – for instance, '...
Not only is Bitch enlightening, but it's also entertaining. Told with verve, humor and plain-language explanations of scientific processes, Cooke's book reads like a travelogue through the still-wild places of the Earth, revealing the complexity of animal life that most of us will never glimpse, and narrated with the tone of a good friend confiding her adventures to the reader. She never hesitates to call out the persistent sexism in academic science, and her rollicking pace and vibrant descriptions ensure the reader is eager for the next exploration and the next stereotype to be taken down...continued
Full Review
(833 words)
(Reviewed by Rose Rankin).
Alice Roberts, author of Evolution
Lucy Cooke blows two centuries of sexist myths right out of biology. Prepare to learn a lot—and laugh out loud. A beautifully written, very funny and deeply important book.
In his seminal work, On the Origin of Species (1859), Charles Darwin elucidated the theory of evolution by natural selection, explaining how organisms better adapted to their environment are more likely to survive and pass on their genes. What he didn't explain, however, was human evolution — that was addressed in his second but much less famous book, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871).
The Descent of Man sought to answer a question that plagued his initial theory of natural selection: Why do traits like a peacock's tail or stag's horns exist when they have no obvious benefit and may even be a hindrance to avoiding predators? Darwin theorized that these characteristics helped in landing a mate — that...
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